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"Be very careful who you let into your neighborhood," Sandra Carpenter, a former Wal-Mart grocery manager from Maryland, warned New Yorkers considering whether to bring Wal-Mart to their town. "They will promise you everything under the sun," she said at a recent anti-Wal-Mart rally outside New York City Hall, "but at the end of the day, they will take it all back." Wal-Mart's high-profile effort to expand into some major urban markets has suddenly cast a spotlight on the experiences of Wal-Mart workers like Carpenter and launched a battle that both Wal-Mart and the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), the union that represents grocery workers, badly need to win. We've seen this fight before. Six years ago, Wal-Mart tried hard to break ground in Chicago, New York, Washington, D.C., and other cities. Opposition was fierce, and the battles were bruising for both Wal-Mart and its opponents—revealing institutional and political weaknesses on both sides. This round promises to do the...